It seems like the White Sox made an all right deal for Dylan Cease, with the now officially completed trade bringing back a package from the Padres of starting pitching prospects Drew Thorpe and Jairo Iriarte, major league reliever Steven Wilson and teenage outfield prospect Samuel Zavala. With Iriarte already on the 40-man roster, the White Sox designated outfielder Peyton Burdick, less than three weeks after claiming him off waivers.
Response from scouts across the league range from underwhelmed but not dismissive of the return, to teams that have computer models declaring this a great haul for the White Sox. With the mix of safety and projection present in this return, it's assessing the futures of Iriarte and Zavala where the evaluations really swing.
Over the past few months, the White Sox have touted Cease's perfect health track record and the stability that comes with it, but his sky-high walk rates still make him a divisive player when trying to solicit ace-caliber prospect returns from teams. While the Rangers and Yankees are the names that got publicized for making offers for Cease, the Padres won out in a process that had the White Sox contacting a numerous other contenders and trying to build a package fronted by two premium prospects.
Ahead of his biggest move yet as White Sox GM, Chris Getz repeatedly stressed his desire to aid help the team in the present and future with any deal for his opening day starter. At first blush, it's impossible, since losing Cease takes away the only sure thing in a starting rotation that needs a lot to go right. But it was a means of communicating that the Sox wanted near-ready contributors and were preferential toward headliners who were at Double-A or higher.
Steven Wilson, a 29-year-old slider-centric, extreme-fly-ball righty reliever will probably be the only player from this trade that my mother will be able to pick out of a lineup for a while. He's not without his control warts and could have issues with Guaranteed Rate Field's cozy confines, but Wilson has a 3.48 ERA in 106 major league innings and immediately figures to work in high-leverage for a 2024 Sox bullpen that has picked up its share of injuries recently. And with four years of team control left, it's not inconceivable for Wilson to be a factor on a future White Sox team that has a higher calling than hopefully surprising some people.
Drew Thorpe is ostensibly the headliner, since he was ostensibly just the headliner for the Juan Soto trade coming from the Yankees a few months prior. There are league evaluators I spoke to Wednesday night who went as far at projecting a No. 2 starter ceiling on the strength of the 23-year-old right-hander's exceptional command and changeup.
With a low-90s fastball, which still represents a small velocity jump from when he was a second-round pick in 2022, others scouts see Thorpe as simply a safe back-end starter. The current Sox rotation could certainly use a safe back-end starter right now, and Thorpe throws enough strikes to envision him debuting this season despite only having 30⅓ (excellent) innings at Double-A. Since the Sox just beheaded their rotation, Thorpe provides support for an argument that it could look better by before the close of the season.
Where the trade could swing begins with 22-year-old right-hander Jairo Iriarte, who broke out with a big velocity jump to the mid-90s in 2023 and struck out 40.5 percent of hitters in 29⅓ innings when he reached Double-A at the end of the season. If you believe in the wiry Venezuela native as a freak athlete who can grow into command -- and the White Sox probably don't make the trade if there's not some hope that he is -- it's front-of-the-rotation stuff. But several scouts see him as somewhere between having big-time reliever risk, or just being a flat-out certain reliever, although likely an impact high-leverage one.
Iriarte walked 11.6 percent of hitters in 90⅓ total innings last season, so command growth of some kind has to happen either way. And it sums up why Iriarte is seen as farther away from major league contributions than Thorpe despite similar experience levels.
Two pitching prospects with mid-rotation potential provide a sizable opportunity for Brian Bannister and Matt Zaleski to show some organization-shaping impact in building a formidable rotation. But where some scouts see this deal really tipping in the White Sox's favor is 19-year-old corner outfielder Samuel Zavala. He represents the biggest deviation from the focus on near-ready prospects in this whole pursuit, but stylistically, he's a little different from the sort of hitters the Sox chased in the 2016-17 rebuild trades.
Zavala hit .267/.420/.451 in 101 games at Low-A while being young for the level and not turning 19 until last July. It's a tricky line to evaluate, since it's at a level of play where a mature approach like the one Zavala touts can carry his on-base percentage in a way that might not hold up at higher levels and papers over some holes that showed up his zone coverage. Makeup will become a topic of discussion with Zavala, where some have questioned his focus, and other scouts have pointed out Zavala plays with swagger and attitude that people will either love or hate. That profile doesn't always get as much grace as it should, and even scouts who brought up his makeup to me reminded that he's still a teenager who should be given a chance to mature and develop.
If Zavala's desire to get better shines through his time with the White Sox, he has talent to have real impact and round out a meaningful infusion into the system.
In breaking down the potential of this entire return, it's quick to lose perspective of the organizational failure that trading away the last two seasons of Cease pre-free agency years represents. The depth and development issues that forced the White Sox hand here, or simply made carrying Cease on the roster not worth it, need to be reversed for this trade to be worth it as well.
But in the pure transactional evaluation that dominates the immediate response to this rare late-spring training deal, the scouting consensus that I've discerned is that the White Sox jumped for this package because they got fair value. And some are willing to argue the Sox brought in more than they would want to see their own team give up for Cease.
